CloudBees’ Stance on the Hudson Name-Change

Sacha Labourey complains of an unfair asymmetry in the Hudson community.

Sacha Labourey of CloudBees has posted his thoughts on the current
Hudson/Jenkins stalemate. He sees the Hudson community as
suffering from an “asymmetry:’ Oracle own the brand and every other
contributor has to sign a contributor agreement in order to gain a
copyright license. Labourey does not have issue with this
asymmetry, pointing out that this is common in many projects, such
as JBoss and Glassfish. The sticking point for him is that, in his
opinion, the “owner” of this asymmetry contribute little IP to the
project, but gain lots of free IP from the Hudson contributors.
Although Labourey claims to trust the Oracle representative he has
been negotiating with, and Adam Bayer supports this by blogging that recent talks with Oracle have
been “fruitful,” there is still no guarantee that Oracle will not
force through decisions for Hudson in the future. Bayer has
referred to this as “living under a sword of Damocles,” something
the Hudson team are not too keen on.

“So, what was the right decision? Was it be better for the
community to keep investing its time and energy in the existing
brand, and take the risk that it could fire back at some point in
the future or was it better to “sanitize” the situation upfront and
invest those efforts in building a new brand, hence removing the
asymmetry that currently exists in the community?” says Sacha
Labourey.

The next move is down to Oracle, who are slated to release a
proposal on the future of Hudson “later this week.” Oracle can
either continue working on their project under the Hudson brand, or
participate in Jenkins. Labourey encourages Oracle to opt for
Jenkins, as has Bayer, even offering Oracle representative Winston
Prakash a place on Jenkins’ interim governance board, should they
decide to get involved.

Labourey also takes this opportunity to clarify that CloudBees
does not intend to replace Oracle as the “asymmetry” in the Jenkins
community. “CloudBees has no intention to own the trademark on the
new brand, to own the IP of the project or anything else,” he
says.

The move has the support of James Gosling, who blogged that the Hudson community have been
patient in their efforts to resolve the dispute with Oracle, but
“given Oracle’s character” an outcome like this was inevitable.
“Oracle is certainly consistent in maintaining their reputation,”
he concludes.